This invention relates to a medication processing system for use in a pharmacy in e.g. a hospital for prescribing and inspecting medications and gathering data on e.g. the processing time for each drug type at each processing station and processing the thus gathered data.
In a hospital pharmacy, when a pharmacist receives prescriptions or prescribing instructions, he selects drugs designated in the prescriptions from among a stock of medications including powdered drugs, tablets, external drugs and liquid drugs, prepares them, and hands the thus prepared drugs to patients. Workload for such drug preparations is increasing at a rapid pace with an increase in the kinds of drugs needed, resulting partly from sophistication of modern medicine and partly from an increasing number of departments due to fractionization. Thus, it is desired now, more than ever before, to prepare drugs efficiently and hand them to waiting patients as quickly as possible.
To prepare drugs efficiently, various devices have been developed and actually used. Such devices include tablet packaging machines which can package tablets for each dose, powder drug packaging machines for packaging a powdered drug for each dose, and drug conveyor means.
Apart from these drug preparation devices, unexamined Japanese utility model publication 63-139643 discloses a display device for displaying a drug preparation procedure. This device lets patients waiting for drugs know how soon they can receive their drugs. Specifically, this device indicates on a display panel in which stage is the drug preparation for each patient. This device also has a monitoring unit for monitoring the above information so that drugs for patients who have been waiting longer are prepared with priority.
Although such conventional arrangements enable the individual drug processing and inspecting units to operate with greater efficiency, they cannot necessarily shorten the entire drug processing time in an optimum way. For example, if a large quantity of powdered drugs have to be prepared in a given unit time range, it is impossible to sufficiently shorten the entire drug processing time even if the tablet processing unit can prepare tablets with greater efficiency.
But such a thing often happens. That is, in a given time range of one day or at a given time of one year, it may be necessary to prepare exceedingly larger quantities of drugs in a certain drug processing unit than in other drug processing units. Therefore, to improve the entire drug processing efficiency, it is necessary to get information on the workload on each drug processing unit in each unit time range. In the conventional systems, it is impossible to get such information.
The display device disclosed in the above utility model publication shows simply which type or types of drugs for each patient are not yet processed on the display panel and the monitor. It can not show which drug processing or inspecting station is heavily burdened with a workload.
That is, this device can simply estimate the waiting time for each patient and make it possible to process drugs for patients waiting longer with priority. It cannot tell which processing or inspecting station is currently the busiest.
This invention has been made to solve these problems of the conventional medication processing systems, and its object is to provide a medication processing system having a control unit for gathering and processing data on the processing time in the respective drug processing units and patient data and displaying the thus processed data on a display so that more pharmacy personnel can be distributed to the busiest station.